Schools` Handling Of Influx Praised

August 22, 1985|By Joseph Cosco, Staff Writer

MIAMI — Children of the Mariel boatlift successfully were integrated into the Dade County school system despite vast cultural differences and inadequate federal support, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Cuban-American National Foundation.

``The Dade County School System`s experience was a textbook lesson on how an educational institution cut red tape and mobilized its human resources to handle an emergency,`` according to Helga Silva, author of the report.

Silva serves as deputy director of news for Radio Marti.

Silva`s report details how the 1980 boatlift forced the county school system to absorb about 11,000 Cuban children, a school population greater than 95 percent of the nation`s school districts, in a matter of months.

The school system handled the unprecendented crisis well, according to the report.

But Dade Schools Superintendent Leonard Britton said at a news conference that the district now is struggling with other refugee children, among them Haitians and Nicaraguans, who are finding it even tougher to fit into the systems.

Silva wrote that some of the Mariel children ``rose to shine,`` among them Liana Alvarez, who is now studying engineering at MIT.

Others ``fell through the cracks of the system,`` like Emilio Maruri, who spent more time in jail than in school.

A third segment, about 2,000 minors who came unaccompanied in the boatlift, apparently was not even touched by the system.

Alvarez said the experience was a rough one but that she never felt stigmatized by the term ``Marielito,`` which came to be a perjorative name for the small criminal element among the 125,000 Mariel refugees.

``I always said that I came through Mariel. I have never been ashamed,`` said Alvarez, the 1984 salutatorian at South Miami Senior High School. ``It was my way to get out.``

In many ways, the Mariel students were no different from previous Cuban refugee students. In another way, considering the length of time spent under a communist regime, they were.